Asia Pacific|Jack Dorsey, Posting About Myanmar on Twitter, Is Accused of Being Tone Deaf

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Jack Dorsey, Posting About Myanmar on Twitter, Is Accused of Being Tone Deaf

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Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, praised the country and people of Myanmar over the weekend, but was criticized for not mentioning the oppression of ethnic Rohingya there.CreditCreditAnushree Fadnavis/Reuters

HONG KONG — Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, fresh off a silent-meditation retreat in Myanmar, was so smitten with his visit that he posted a series of glowing tweets about the country and its people, urging others to travel there.

But his posts on Sunday were called out by many on Twitter for not mentioning the plight of the Rohingya, a mostly Muslim minority group that has faced a ruthless campaign of violence and persecution at the hands of Myanmar’s military that caused hundreds of thousands to flee.

Mr. Dorsey now faces a backlash from critics who described his travel missives — which included a description of how he used his Apple Watch in airplane mode to track his heart rate during meditation and rest — as politically tone deaf.

Before 2012, it could still be argued “that to ignore the boycott by visiting Myanmar, you were lending important financial support to ordinary people who were not involved in the junta and were largely innocent of any moral wrongdoing,” said Stuart McDonald, a co-founder of Travelfish, a travel website covering Southeast Asia.

“Today, that doesn’t really hold,” he said, “as the actions against specifically the Rohingya, but also the Muslim minority population in general, enjoy a degree of popular support within the general population.”

Myanmar has denied that its military committed atrocities against the Rohingya, saying it was merely responding to attacks by Rohingya militants. But United Nations experts said in August, echoing reporting by human rights groups, that top Myanmar generals should face trial in an international court for genocide against the Rohingya and crimes against humanity targeting other ethnic minorities.

How all of that will ultimately affect Myanmar’s tourism industry — which has generally boomed since 2012 — is unclear.

But year-on-year visitor arrivals of American and Canadian travelers in Myanmar were down nearly 15 percent through September, and more than 26 percent for visitors from Western Europe, according to government figures. People working in Myanmar’s travel industry said in interviews on Monday that they attributed the slump to concerns about the military’s treatment of the Rohingya.

But tourist arrivals were up nearly 34 percent for Chinese travelers in the same period, and more than 10 percent for those from Asia as a whole, government figures show. Several in the tourism industry said that an overall rise in the number of Asian visitors made them optimistic about future prospects.

“If three million Westerners don’t want to come, then three million easterners will come,” said U Win Zaw Oo, the chairman of the Mandalay Tourist Guide Society. “Our country will not be ruined as Westerners want it to be. We can manage.”

Renaud Egreteau, the author of “Caretaking Democratization: The Military and Political Change in Myanmar,” said he doubted that a new era of tourism boycotts could force Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s political party, the National League for Democracy, to show more empathy toward ethnic and religious minorities generally, or Rohingya in particular.

Mr. Egreteau said one reason was that boycotting specific tourist attractions or practicing so-called ethical tourism — in which tourists choose to minimize their negative impacts on local culture, politics or the environment — had become more popular than “broadly shunning holidays to the country.”

Vicky Bowman, the director of the Myanmar Center for Responsible Business, said that much effort had been made recently to develop “sustainable, culture-focused and community-based tourism offerings” in the country, and that such initiatives would fold if affluent Westerners chose not to visit.